MISS JESSIE DUKES AND KID HEAVYWinner of the 2003 Linda Flowers Prizeby Heather Ross Miller

When Miss Jessie Dukes died, I heard they buried her in a ballerina’s tutu, white and filmy as a wedding veil.

I didn’t believe it. Even when they said it was a long tutu down to her ankles, her being so old and gnarled as a tree trunk. I still didn’t believe it.

In fact, I didn’t even believe Miss Jessie Dukes died.

NC CROSSROADSA Publication of the North Carolina Humanities Council—Weaving Cultures and Communities

Winner of the 1999 Helen & Martin Schwartz Prize for Excellence in Public Programming

ISSN 1094-2351 Volume 7, Issue 3 December 2003

3

Publisher’s Note

This story is a work of fiction. The setting and physical structures, however, are accurate for their time and place. Although the photographs used in this story are actual, the characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are fictitious.

3

When Miss Jessie Dukes died, I heard they buried her in a ballerina’s tutu, white and filmy as a wedding veil.

I didn’t believe it. Even when they said it was a long tutu down to her ankles, her being so old and gnarled as a tree trunk. I still didn’t believe it.

In fact, I didn’t even believe Miss Jessie Dukes died.

She was like this, you see, coming out of some place like Dipstick, South Carolina, tearing off in the late 1930s to go type in the Main Office at Carolina Aluminum Company in Badin. Badin such a wild place then. Full of rough men smelting aluminum, swinging cranes and wrangling big crucibles of hot metal, pouring silvery ingots, what they called pigs.

Not that rough men interested Miss Jessie. At first.

Her hair, the same dark bitter chocolate as her eyes, flourished like a helmet, shaped to her perfect head and ears, dropping a long thick bang right over her brows. She drove those men nuts.

Her fingers flashed over the typewriter keys. Envelopes and pages stacked up beside it. She never looked at the big wall clock hanging over the entrance. She never flinched when those banshee whistles shrieked the changes of shifts out in the smelter yard.

She never paid any attention to Old Man Copp, her disgusting Yankee boss from Pittsburgh, sniffing around her desk, making eyes. His wife drove a big black Buick around town, hung up in perpetual second gear, straining the motor and making us laugh as she went by, nose in the air. Old Lady Copp was very near-sighted, too, and hunched forward over the steering wheel to see better.

The Buick coughed and heaved her up the steep hill to The Club where she played golf. Where they all played golf, the bosses of Carolina Aluminum Company, and their near-sighted wives.

My best friend, Fluff McKinney, caddied for them. He said they couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, much less a teeny little golf ball. ‘I can play golf bettern them,’ Fluff told me. ‘Gloria Jean, me and you gonna sneak in and play all eighteen holes one day,’ he promised.

Miss Jessie Dukes and Kid Heavy

Main Office

4 5

It sounded more like a threat than a promise coming out of Fluff’s hard little mouth. He was a small boy, honey-blond and freckled. I loved Fluff.

This is where Miss Jessie got in the story.

We all lived in apartments down below The Club. There was also a big white-columned Annex to The Club where people stayed in rooms dusted by maids and ate in the dining room cooled by ceiling fans with blades the size of palm trees.

Fluff caddied on the golf course for people like the Copps. Miss Jessie never played golf, but she could be seen going into the dining room in the Annex with various escorts, usually new engineers down from the Pittsburgh office, or new technicians training lazy Southerners to read gauges and adjust dials in the rotary stations.

But she lived in a row-house apartment the same as we did, Fluff down on Kirk Place, near the golf course. Miss Jessie right around the corner on Boyden from me on Spruce.

And at the edge of town, in the farthest horizon, sat the smelter, poisonous as a toad, spewing and belching its noisy fire, those silvery ingots stacking up inside its wire fences.

By now we’d gotten into the 40s and World War II.

We had blackouts and air-raid practices at night.

We had to do this. We might get bombed.

And sometimes Miss Jessie Dukes forgot, lit candles in her apartment on Boyden and sat listening to the radio and dreaming, I imagined,

of some faraway Navy commander, some Army Air Corps commander, some grizzled Marine.

Actually, it was Kid Heavy, one of those rough men.

Kid Heavy, just like Fluff McKinney, knew he could play golf, do anything, just as good as if not better than the big dogs at the top. That’s what we called people like Old Man Copp and his wife, the big dogs.

Kid Heavy’s real name was Joe Martello, and his people came from Sicily, real stone masons

Apartment House

Clubhouse Annex

4 5

to build the three dams across the Yadkin River. For a long time they lived in tent camps near the building sites. I know this because my grandpa used to drive up there and sell them vegetables and eggs and stuff from his farm.

My people came off nearby farms. So did Fluff’s people. Miss Jessie Dukes, well, who knows what’s down in South Carolina? And Kid Heavy’s people, came all the way here across the Atlantic Ocean to live in tents.

All of us colliding in one little place, Badin, where right in the middle of the corn-shucking, hog-killing South, rose up a belching, screeching aluminum smelter. Run by Yankees, I might add, who felt we only knew two ways to make a living: textiles and tobacco.

Can you imagine what it was like for all of those people walking into all that fire and noise, all that magnetic wizardry? Such thoughts used to fascinate me for hours. Farm boys, black and white, walking right into the devil’s hot workshop. Sicilians walking right into an English-speaking hell.

Anyhow. Something worked. They built the smelter, built the town, paved its muddy streets, and gave it a weird name after a French guy

nobody ever heard of, Adrian Badin. And Kid Heavy’s people quarried stone and dressed it in place to hold back the deep muddy Yadkin.

And out of the Yadkin, they got power to run the potrooms.

My daddy and Fluff’s worked in the potrooms. They sweated until they got white-eyed and their fellows pulled them outside to recover. It was so hot in there, they kept the windows wide open in the middle of January with snow on the ground.

Kid Heavy worked in there, too, a foreman, smart and big, hence his name. He was big, big. Not fat. Just big. I fancied he could stretch out his arm and Miss Jessie Dukes could stand under it. Thoughts like that made me happy. I was thirteen

back then, when all this happened. Fluff, too.

Kid Heavy drove around in a filthy old truck with his equally filthy old dog, Buster. But nobody laughed at Kid the way we laughed at Old Lady Copp in her gasping black Buick. By this time his people had moved into apartments all over town. But Kid lived in one room of the old boarding house on Maple Street. Nothing like The Club and the Annex, the boarding house was full of pretty

decent and happy people, single people, who worked at the smelter just like Kid. Buster wasn’t allowed in the house with Kid, but had his own little dog-run in the back yard.

Alcoa Plant

Narrows Dam on the Yadkin River

6 7

They had high drama in that boarding house. And Kid Heavy was always part of it. The story went that one evening at supper, after Mrs. Hoyt, the proprietor and cook, passed around a huge

bowl of excellent gravy, one of the guys got in a fight with another guy. Not a fight, at first, but it got louder and louder as the food kept going around the table. Then one of the guys stood up and picked up the big bowl of gravy and said he was fixing to throw it at the other guy across the table.

At which point, Kid stood up himself, all six feet and more of him, and said, ‘You put down that gravy. That’s good gravy.’

The guy passed the bowl back over to Kid and sat down, sufficiently chastened. This story usually ended with people laughing about how Kid Heavy didn’t care if those guys killed each other. He just wanted to save that good gravy.

In any case, after he began going out with Miss Jessie, Kid’s truck got washed. Buster had on a collar, and his coat shone as if brushed, which it had been. By Kid Heavy. That was another vision I liked: Kid brushing Buster, gradually bringing out his red-gold sheen from under all the burrs and mud. Buster was a kind of Irish setter mix, so he had long thick auburn fur.

And a big loud mouth. He barked at everybody, nobody could pet him. Except Miss Jessie Dukes, who could actually cuddle Buster in her arms, him slavering and wagging his tail all the time. That

fool dog would actually turn over on his back with all four paws in the air and beg her to tickle his belly.

These two people had powers, Jessie and Kid. They came out of nowhere and showed us things, me and Fluff McKinney. Though they never even knew who we were. Fluff was just the little boy who caddied all weekend at The Club, and delivered Miss Jessie’s Charlotte Observer every morning.

I was Gloria Jean, a little girl who showed up in her ballet class, awkward and ambitious. Neither she nor Kid Heavy ever knew how they thrilled us, me and Fluff. But Fluff, of course, wasn’t in the ballet class.

Can you imagine a ballet class plopped down in the middle of that town? Miss Jessie decided she could teach ballet on the weekends, after typing all week in the Main Office, ignoring Old Man Copp’s insinuations. She decided she needed the refreshing expression ballet might bring. Also the reward of teaching Badin’s silly little girls to dance.

Kid Heavy was an influence in the union, so he got her permission to hold classes in the big Union Hall, as ugly a building as you could hope to find. We assembled in the middle of a wide wooden floor, no mirrors, no barres to the sides of us, and we beheld Miss Jessie Dukes who would show us the way out of small-town misery.

Such words weren’t in our vocabularies back then, but we knew there was something better than ore dust all over our front porches, graying our mothers’ wet laundry hung to dry in the back yards, piling up in gray swirls in every corner of our apartments.

Ore dust. Fly ash. Call it what you will. It flew all over Badin and settled all over our faces, down deep to our innards.

Boardinghouse

6 7

Then Miss Jessie appeared before us, resplendent in a paisley sarong tied around her hips, a full-length black leotard scooping her collarbone, ending neatly at her wrists and ankles. There she stood! Barefoot, no less!

And she patiently took us through the five positions of classical ballet, teaching us the French for dancing, jeté, relevé, bourée, bourée, en pointe!

One Saturday she actually appeared en pointe, her feet bound in pink satin boxed-toed slippers. We swooned with joy and love. We had no satin on our feet, no sarong, no black leotard. We danced behind Miss Jessie Dukes in our denim shorts and tee shirts, a few of us in halter-tops tied over flat, flat chests, one girl, Loretta Hays, always showing up in her print seersucker bathing suit that had a little ruffly skirt. We were what you might call a motley crew. But I didn’t know that term then. And anyhow, what did we care, a gang of little girls who wanted to dance, dance!

We sat on the Union Hall floor and worshiped Jessie Dukes en pointe, how she glided and leaped and shimmered around that ugly place, how she inflamed our souls. She was joy, life, the precious blood of escape.

I know I’m getting carried away here. But that’s exactly how it was for us at thirteen years old, back in the 40s, as World War II rocketed into victory over both Europe and Japan. Victory for us was Miss Jessie Dukes en pointe. A woman who

typed all week, then danced like a dream on Saturdays just for us.

Dreams don’t last.

You have to wake up.

I’ve lived to be sixty now, and I’ve been successful, as they say, I’ve made it. But not without those enchanted Saturdays when Jessie Dukes rose to

stand on her pink satin toes and leapt around the Union Hall, and we sat on the floor and swooned. Swooned!

There would be need of swooning soon enough. And the end to all pink satin toe shoes, to all dreams of dancing. I’d actually thought one day Miss Jessie Dukes and Kid Heavy might sweep into The Club and dance all over the Annex floor, stopping only to accept golden goblets of icy champagne from off the silver trays of waiters in white jackets.

I’d actually thought the big dogs, Old Man and Old Lady Copp, would stand on the sides with their mouths hanging open, watching the genuine dance of genuine love, Miss Jessie, Kid, while Buster waited quietly in the truck at the curb.

This did not happen.

Kid Heavy fell off a catwalk in one of the potrooms, fell through a railing that should have been replaced, but was not and gave way against his mass. He fell hard, at least two stories, to hit the cement foundation along the potlines.

It knocked him out, of course, and when he came to, he was in the little company hospital Carolina Aluminum kept for employees and their families. The doctor said he couldn’t do a thing. Kid’s back was broken. Kid was dying.

Union Hall (upstairs)

8 9

For nearly a week, Kid Heavy was either awake and yelling with pain, out of his head with pain, or mercifully passed out. Miss Jessie Dukes stood in the corner of his room, we heard, behind the weeping Martello women who prayed with long rosaries in foreign words.

She stood there and waited, we heard, nobody paying her any attention. She stood there until Kid gave it up and died for good, a big and magnificently broken man.

Then Miss Jessie Dukes went out of the little company hospital, out into a mild June evening, the sun westering over the turrets and smoke stacks of Carolina Aluminum. My daddy said the company ought to pay for Kid Heavy getting killed on the job. He thought the family ought to go to court over it. Maybe they did. People didn’t really know about stuff like that back then.

My daddy always said the company came roaring down here like vultures back in the early 1900s and stomped around the place and did whatever it liked. Flashed enough money to get every ignorant farmer in three counties to sell his long-held family land and timber.

Then Daddy got on to his most favorite outrage about how they backed water from the Yadkin all over

the old farms and barns and houses. Even over graveyards! Even big old trees, still standing down at the bottom, Daddy said, with ninety feet of muddy water over them! An outrage!

I could sit and think on that for a long time. Trees still standing down at the bottom of ninety feet of cold muddy water. People’s houses with kitchen and stairs and front porches. Barns with plow leads and mule collars still hanging on nails.

I couldn’t stand it. I shivered, the skin on both my arms raising goose bumps.

Daddy revved up to a higher gear, got to going really loud before it was over, saying how the government ought not to let big industry do things like that. ‘Not just to

trees and graveyards,’ he fumed, ‘but to good old guys like Kid Heavy.’

Daddy shook his head, lit another Philip Morris. ‘Just think about that,’ he said, ‘Kid lying in that hospital all broke to pieces on account of they didn’t fix that damn railing.’

Mama said, ‘I thought that’s what the union was for. To get things fixed like that.’

Daddy spat in his coffee cup. ‘The union,’ he almost cursed, as if it were another kind of outrage just like the company.

I thought the union ought to have gotten a lot of things fixed. Like Mama said. Fixed the catwalk. Fixed the ore dust blowing all over town, burning our eyes, stopping up our lungs.

Potroom

Falls Dam

8 9

Fixed it so Miss Jessie hadn’t lost Kid. Or poor old loud Buster.

Where’s the social justice in that?

Where’s the love?

Of course, such concepts weren’t in my vocabulary yet. But they would be.

The company acted ashamed of itself. Old Man and Old Lady Copp showed up for Kid’s funeral, sitting one row behind the Martello family in the Catholic church.

Fluff McKinney and I actually got to go despite our strong Southern Baptist upbringing. Our mamas actually let us go to the tiny church stuck in a pine grove, a church with gray shingles all over, and with a magnificent name: Our Lady of the Annunciation.

It seemed so right to me, Our Lady. Annunciation. Like this whole sad and shocking episode was an announcement of some kind, a holy vision. And Fluff and I were part of it. We craned our necks off looking at the little red vigil candles, the priest in his robe, and the statue of the Holy Mother.

We craned our necks off looking for Miss Jessie Dukes.

She did not appear.

‘It smells like a birthday cake in here,’ whispered Fluff. He meant the melting wax candles, the strange incense. I liked Fluff saying birthday. Not deathday. Birthday.

The union acted like it was ashamed, too, and for awhile after Kid Heavy’s accident, the union guys charged around, submitting petitions, holding special referendums. But then it died back down. Like a brush fire. I thought, well, that’s a man’s life: you blaze up like a brush fire, then you die back down.

I thought maybe Miss Jessie might do something. Jump on top of a horse like Joan of Arc and ride in to the Main Office to get justice for that good man she lost. For big Joe Martello, whose people came over a whole ocean just for him to end up flat on his back on the smelter floor like a pile of pick-up sticks my little brother played with.

My little brother dumped the sticks out, then tried to pull each brightly colored one out without disturbing the rest of the pile and bringing it all down.

He never could do it.

Neither could Joe Martello, also known as Kid Heavy.

Kid Heavy had union insurance. Maybe his family felt satisfied enough with the pay off from that. Fluff McKinney said if it had been him that fell off that catwalk in the potroom, he’d sue their damn asses off.

But that was just Fluff talking. He kept on caddying at The Club. He told me somebody bought Kid’s old truck. He didn’t know what became of Buster. I had hopes of Buster going to live with Miss Jessie on Boyden Street in her cozy corner apartment. She had a big sloping yard where a dog could run and roll and then take long doggy naps under her flourishing lobelia bushes while honeybees buzzed overhead.

The Clubhouse

10 11

We never danced again. She stopped our Saturday ballet lessons, though she did get up a car load of us sometimes to go over to Ovens Auditorium in Charlotte to see performances of Coppelia or Swan Lake. I liked Coppelia better. Swan Lake was just too sad. I cried in the car on our way back to Badin. We pulled in at Dulin’s Grove to get a Coca Cola and a bear claw, but it didn’t stop me crying.

‘It’s all right,’ Miss Jessie said to Loretta Hays who kept pinching me. ‘Let Gloria Jean cry it out. That’s the way it is, you know.’

Kid Heavy’s people buried him in the city cemetery in Albemarle, a grim place with no trees or bushes to soften the gravestones. Fluff McKinney and I went over there and tried to find it. The place was spread out too big. We looked and looked for Kid Heavy. Finally we just sat down on the ground and ate the peanut butter and Ritz crackers we’d brought with us.

‘I saw them smooching, you know,’ said Fluff.

‘Who smooching?’ I didn’t connect at first.

It was Miss Jessie and Kid he’d seen smooching. He was coming back from a Scout meeting, a hot summer night, and as Fluff passed by her apartment on Boyden, he saw, through the wide-opened front door, Miss Jessie Dukes and Kid Heavy sitting on the couch smooching up a storm.

That burned me up. I’d have loved to see them smooching myself. Just me alone.

‘They smooched and smooched,’ continued Fluff, almost sighing over his recollection. ‘And it wasn’t nothing nasty, neither,’ he added fiercely, as if he dared me to sneer or giggle. ‘It was all good plain old smooching.’

Good plain old smooching. Honest smooching. I love you! kind of smooching.

I sighed just like Fluff.

We finished the peanut butter and Ritz, dusted ourselves off, and went back to Badin with our mothers who had been shopping downtown at Belk’s, getting us new back-to-school stuff.

What was to become of us? We wanted to dance on our toes. We wanted to play golf better than the big dogs at The Club. We wanted Kid Heavy and Miss Jessie back, and, God help him, we

wanted poor old Buster back.

Instead we went back to school. We finished Badin High School, it seemed, in a hurry. Kid Heavy moldering in his lost grave all the while, I reckon. Miss Jessie Dukes typed until she got old and retired from Carolina Aluminum, her dark bitter chocolate bob turned powder white, but still thick and tight as a helmet, the bangs still rich across her brows.

Me, I got out of Badin, got as far as Charlotte, due southwest, if you can call that really getting out of town. I went to King’s Business College, then got a good job in the biggest hospital

over there, working in medical records where within a few years, I was manager of the whole east wing. I typed as furiously as Miss Jessie, I know. Learned new things about running a business office, things she never knew, keypunch, calculator, personal computer, modem, fax. Those high tech names swirled through my head the same as the names for classical ballet, bourée, pas de deux, pirouette.

Downtown Badin

10 11

I have season tickets to the city symphony, the opera, the ballet. And I still cry over Swan Lake.

Fluff McKinney didn’t get out of town. He got bigger, though, with muscles like a rock. Went to work in the potrooms, safer by then on account of all that OSHA stuff. He was in the union, too. Fluff made a lot of money, enough to buy himself a membership in The Club. He played almost flawless championship golf in their rinky-dink little tourneys. And he was always generous with the caddies, tipping them way beyond their expectations.

I guess he remembered things.

I remembered things, too, and now I’ve sat here and thought it all through again, I’m ready to change my mind about the way I started this out. I’m thinking now, yes, they probably did bury Miss Jessie Dukes in a long ballerina tutu, a soft filmy white thing from Swan Lake. I’m ready to believe she had it written out in her will, witnessed and signed. And I’m further willing to bet, if they’d bothered to look beneath the tulle, they’d have seen pink satin toe shoes on her ancient feet.

I never danced again. But I sent my daughters to ballet classes, and I sat in the recitals and watched them, awkward and silly as goslings all over the stage, and I wept with genuine joy.

So, here’s to you, Miss Jessie, my first, last, and best teacher.

Falls Road looking East

Heather Ross Miller

phot

o co

urte

sy o

f th

e au

thor

I hope Kid Heavy was waiting for you on the other side, Buster, too, the old truck idling, and Kid took your hand as you stepped across, gallantly raised you en pointe in your satin slippers, and then the two of you smooched and smooched, good and plain and honest.

12 13

Resources

Buchanan, D. Douglas, and the Stanly County Museum. Images of America: Stanly County. Arcadia Press, 2000.

Carr, Charles Carl. ALCOA, An American Enterprise. Arno Press, 1972 [c. 1951].

Glass, Brent. Badin: A Town at the Narrows—An Historical and Architectural Survey. Stanly County Historic Properties Commission, 3rd Edition, 2001.

Hester, Rosemarie. “Badin, NC,” An Oral History, Southern Oral History Program, UNC Chapel Hill, 1980.

Horton, Clarence E. “Piedmont Neighbors: Historical Sketches of Cabarrus, Stanly and Southern Rowan Counties from the Pages of Progress Magazine.” Concord Telephone Company, 1999.

Peck, Rodney M., ed. Hardaway Origins and Adaptations, 2003.

Sharpe, Ivey Lawrence. Stanly County, USA: The Story of an Area and an Era, 1841-1991. Media Press, 1990.

Smith, George David. From Monopoly to Competition: The Transformation of ALCOA, 1888-1986. Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Town of Badin: www.badin.org

Stanly County Historic Commission425 East Main StreetAlbemarle, NC 28801

704-986-3777

Stanly County Public Library133 East Main StreetAlbemarle, NC 28991

Heritage Room: 704-986-3768www.stanlylib.org

Badin Historical Museum64 Falls RoadPO Box 516Badin, NC 28009

704-422-6900www.badin.org/museum.htm

Photos of Badin courtesy of the Badin Historical Museum. Special thanks to David Summerlin for making them available for this publication.

Drawing of the Badin Historical Museum (below) by Bridget Huckabee, used with permission of the artist.

12 13

The Linda Flowers Prize is awarded annually to the author of an original literary work that addresses a public humanities theme in an especially noteworthy way. The selection of the prize-winning entry is based on its capacity to capture the richness of North Carolina, its people and cultures. Established in 2000, the prize honors the memory of Dr. Linda Flowers (1944-2000), who served on the North Carolina Humanities Council with great distinction from 1992-1998. Linda was the author of the acclaimed book, Throwed Away—Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina, and “Coming Home,” NC CROSSROADS, 1998.

Winners of the Linda Flowers Prize

The Cure by Karen Gilchrist, 2001

Land of Amnesia by Joseph Bathanti, 2002

Miss Jessie Dukes and Kid Heavy by Heather Ross Miller, 2003

Heather Ross Miller is the author of a dozen books of poetry and fiction. She is the Thomas H. Broadus Distinguished Professor Emerita at Washington and Lee University, where she taught creative writing and American literature for many years. Miller’s most recent books include Friends and Assassins: Poems (University of Missouri Press), Champeen: A Novel (Southern Methodist University Press) and Crusoe’s Island: The Story of a Writer and a Place: Memoir (Coastal Carolina Press). She was awarded the 1983 North Carolina Gold Medal. Currently, Miller lives in the Morrow Mountain valley of the piedmont area of North Carolina.

14 15

14 15

THE LINDA FLOWERS PRIZE 2004The North Carolina Humanities Council (NCHC) was privileged to have Linda Flowers as one of its members from 1992 to 1998. During the years we shared with her, she taught us many things. Above all, Linda showed us what it means to live by one’s belief that “the humanistic apprehension is as necessary for living fully as anything else ... [it must be] recognize[d] and nurture[d] ... to realize more fully the potential of the human spirit.”

In addition to honoring Linda Flowers (1944-2000) with a prize named for her, the Council seeks to draw to the attention of others something special that Linda passed on to us. We want to celebrate excellence in the humanities achieved by people like her, those who not only identify with our state, but who explore the promises, the problems, the experiences, the meanings, in lives that have been shaped by North Carolina and its many cultures.

Linda Flowers was somewhat surprised by the strong connections readers made to her book, Throwed Away: Failures of Progress in Eastern North Carolina, in 1990. She believed they were responses to “the book’s humanistic dimension: the focus on real men and women having to make their way in the face of a changing, onrushing and typically uncaring world.” This is true to the portraits in Throwed Away; it is just as true of “Coming Home,” the essay Linda wrote about her experience with cancer for NC CROSSROADS. Both are superb examinations of intimate, provocative, inspiring portraiture of North Carolina, its people and cultures. The Linda Flowers Prize is intended for a literary work that demonstrates these powers of recognition.

DESCRIPTION NCHC invites original entries of literary forms for The Linda Flowers Prize. Submissions should engage readers’ understanding of the “humanistic apprehension,” bringing to light “real men and women having to make their way” in the face of “changes and loss, triumphs and disappointments.” Entries are expected to draw particular North Carolina connections and/or memories.

TIMELINE Entries for the 2004 Prize are invited with a May 15, 2004 deadline. The annual prize will be announced after August 1st.

ELIGIBILITY Writers of all ages are eligible. Applicants may or may not be native to or live in North Carolina. The committee prefers to let each submission determine its own weight as an entry, based on how well it speaks to the spirit of the Prize. The committee will review original works of up to 2000-2500 words; typed and double-spaced. Ten copies of each submission are required and a cover letter. The author’s name should not appear on the submission. Entries must be postmarked by May 15th.

SELECTION PROCESS A committee of five persons will be responsible for selecting the Prize winner. They shall be invited by the Council Chair. Four persons will be current NCHC members or alumni; at least one person will come from NC Wesleyan College, where Linda taught. The selection committee will serve for three years. The winning work will reflect the power of the writer’s words to draw readers to new images of the human spirit.

RECIPIENT The winner of The Linda Flowers Prize will receive a cash prize of $500. Her/his original work will be published in the fall issue of NCHC’s NC CROSSROADS and possibly in other Council publications.* The winner will be introduced at the annual John Tyler Caldwell Award for the Humanities.

*The writer will maintain copyright of the literary work with the understanding that the Council may publish or republish it at a later date; for example, in an anthology.

North Carolina Humanities Council 200 South Elm Street, Suite 403 Greensboro, NC 27401 (336) 334-5325 nchc@gborocollege.edu www.nchumanities.org

NC CROSSROADSEditor: Lisa YargerCopy Editor: Katherine M. KubelDesign & Production: PRINT TO FIT

Publisher: Harlan Joel Gradin, Associate Director, NCHCCover photo by Rob Amberg

Heather Ross Miller would like to thank the members of the Linda Flowers Prize Committee, Harlan Gradin and Katherine Kubel, and the staff of the Badin Historical Museum.

To comment on NC CROSSROADS or for more information about NCHC and public humanities programs, please contact us at:

North Carolina Humanities Council200 South Elm Street, Suite 403

Greensboro, NC 27401(336) 334-5325

NCHC@gborocollege.eduwww.nchumanities.org

NC CROSSROADS is a publication of the North Carolina Humanities Council (NCHC). Serving North Carolina for over 30 years, NCHC is a non-profit foundation and state-based affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. NCHC’s mission is to support public education programs.

Please support our continued production of this award-winning publication by sending your tax-deductible contributions to NCHC at the address shown above.